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By HEIDI WALESON

New York

The Metropolitan Opera’s new “Ring” cycle by Robert Lepage has been an uneasy mix of cutting-edge technology and old-fashioned representational staging. With “Siegfried,” the third opera, which opened on Thursday, Mr. Lepage and his team have finally married those elements, thanks in part to new techniques in 3-D imagery. Fire, waterfalls, a rocky mountaintop, a dense forest, even an underground view with slithering worms and skittering bugs, came vividly to life through Pedro Pires’s video images projected against the 24 moving planks of set designer Carl Fillion’s “machine.” There are still some showy transformations (four changes of position and video during the opera’s prelude, for example), but the set is more integrated into the action than it was in “Das Rheingold” and “Die Walküre.” With François St-Aubin’s medieval-looking costumes and long-haired wigs on everyone, Mr. Lepage seems to be trying to give us the kind of realism that Wagner would have put on stage if he had had the technology a century and a half ago.

With the aid of Fabio Luisi’s detailed, balance-sensitive and brisk conducting, and a stellar cast of singers, this “Siegfried” moved away from the static awkwardness of Mr. Lepage’s “Das Rheingold” and “Die Walküre” and presented a lively, propulsive, even comic account of the young Siegfried’s coming of age. Jay Hunter Morris, who took over the punishing title role just a week before the premiere, has a bright, pliant tenor—not large, but ringing and energetic. He brought an appealing goofiness, youthful impulsivity and bumptious self-confidence to Siegfried. His clashes with Gerhard Siegel’s penetrating Mime, grotesquely hunchbacked and absurd in the extremity of his fawning and malevolence, took on a broad, cartoonish humor that worked. So did his quick conquest of Fafner the dragon, who emerged from his cave as a yellow eyed, snaggle-toothed serpent, a caricature of a monster. In this opera, Siegfried’s opponents are easily bested by a young superhero with a magic sword.

Siegfried is on his way up; his grandfather Wotan is on his way down, and the superb, powerful Bryn Terfel gave the Wanderer mercurial flashes of humor and danger as well as moments of grand existential despair. In one of the production’s finest moments, the Wanderer walked to the very edge of a plank, which jutted out over the void like a rocky promontory, and called for the goddess Erda with the desperate, last-ditch ferocity of Lear howling on the heath. His subsequent exchange with Erda, the voluptuous-voiced Patricia Bardon, in a costume of black mirrors and a long white wig, had a potent, intimate chemistry (Wotan and Erda have a history), unusual in a scene that often plays as yet another boring recounting of “Ring” backstory by two bellowing singers. And his encounter with Siegfried, who breaks his staff and knocks him down, felt shocking despite its inevitability.

The theatricality of this “Siegfried” faded somewhat in the final scene, when Siegfried, having passed through the magic fire and several hours of serious singing, awakens Brünnhilde. Deborah Voigt sang with a steely intensity, and not surprisingly, she sounded fresher than Mr. Morris, but her wide-eyed Bride-of-Frankenstein look and a lack of warmth in her sound made this underdirected love scene, which should be climactic, fall flat. Also, Etienne Boucher’s mostly sensitive lighting set their encounter against a dark sky, an odd choice considering that the brilliance of the sun is mentioned more than once.

Eric Owens, looking like a demented Rastafarian in overalls and a long wig, was a growling, frustrated Alberich; Mojca Erdmann was a luminous Forest Bird, more substantial and resonant than the flickering green video image that represented her on stage, and Hans-Peter König was suitably lugubrious as Fafner.

After the rather gray, industrial look of the first two “Ring” operas, it was nice to get some color and texture into the action. I liked the worms, the waterfall that ran red after the killing of Fafner, the shadows of birds that swept across the bleak mountaintop. The video gave nature an organic part in the opera, and nature is certainly present in the music, from the groaning horns of the prelude to the transparent Forest Murmurs. Yet, unlike Francesca Zambello’s “Ring” in San Francisco, in which the degradation of nature is the production’s central theme, Mr. Lepage uses nature as illustration. The theme of his production, if there is one, still seems to be those moving planks, which creak audibly as they turn. But at least they had more to offer the storytelling in this installment of the tetralogy.

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The tenor Jonas Kaufmann, who was a sizzling Siegmund in the Met’s “Die Walküre” last spring and will headline the new “Faust” on Nov. 29, sang a recital at the opera house on Sunday afternoon. A 4,000-seat house is not ideal for the intimacy of Lieder, and Mr. Kaufmann seemed most at home in the more extroverted and operatic moments of his songs by Liszt, Mahler, Duparc and Strauss. Restraint was tougher: He had to work hard to produce soft high notes in the Liszt and Mahler, and to create the French sensuality of line in the Duparc pieces. His rich middle and low ranges were beautifully on display, however, and he brought a contemplative expressivity to the Strauss, especially the heartrending “Befreit.” Mr. Kaufmann loosened up a lot in his encores—four additional Strauss songs and the Lehar chestnut “Dein ist mein ganzes Herz”—giving the audience a taste of the total performer who is so breathtaking when in character. Helmut Deutsch was the supportive and thoughtful pianist.

Ms. Waleson writes about opera for the Journal.

By SARAH MORGAN

It may not be a household word, but the battle over your broker’s “fiduciary” role has moved in a new direction—away, some say, from a lot of clients’ best interests.

A major push by consumer advocates to hold stockbrokers to the same client-comes-first standard of care required of investment advisers—the so-called fiduciary standard—seemed close to success only a year ago. That was after a study by the Securities and Exchange Commission had called for the new rules, despite brokers arguing that dispensing advice was only a part of their business model and they shouldn’t be held to the same standard as advisers in all situations.

The five SEC commissioners, however, never voted to change the rules. Now, the SEC is saying it won’t write any new rules until it studies how much they might cost the industry.

The shift largely is due to an unrelated case from last year, in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia struck down an SEC rule on “proxy access” that would have allowed shareholder groups to put up their own proposals and board-of-directors candidates on company-distributed proxy ballots. The court said that the agency hadn’t done a thorough review of the rule’s potential costs.

That changed the climate for all future SEC rule making, says David Tittsworth, the executive director of the Investment Advisor Association. “The SEC doesn’t want to be proposing rules that will just be struck down,” he says.

Indeed, this month SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro wrote to Congress to confirm that three staff economists were studying the issue and drafting another request for data on the market for retail financial advice.

The SEC declined to comment further.

Though the fiduciary issue is hotly contested among some groups, surveys conducted on behalf of the SEC showed a majority of investors don’t understand what fiduciary means, nor do they realize brokers and investment advisers offer different levels of care.

Investment advisers and financial planners typically offer year-round planning services and portfolio management. Most charge a percentage of assets, usually 1% or so for up to $1 million, but some also charge a straight hourly rate or a fixed fee for whatever help they provide.

Brokers, meanwhile, provide not only advice, but act as agents for clients in securities transactions. They are generally paid commissions or other transaction-based fees.

Under current rules, brokers only need to ensure the products they sell their clients are “suitable,” and not necessarily the best possible or least expensive option. For example, a broker can sell a client a variable annuity that comes with a generous commission over a cheaper product, says Andrew Stoltmann, a Chicago-based securities lawyer who represents investors in arbitration and litigation. Advisers, on the other hand, are held to a fiduciary standard that requires them to recommend the less-pricey option, he says.

Investor advocates say new rules would be an important step forward. “It’s simply good policy, wise and fair. It will give retail customers greater protection,” says Harvey Goldschmid, a professor at Columbia University Law School and a former SEC commissioner.

For their part, brokers say they support the uniform fiduciary standard, but only if it is applied solely to personalized investment advice—and not when they are selling products or executing trades. “The SEC should not take a statute that applies to a different business model and apply that to the broker-dealer business,” says Ira Hammerman, the general counsel for the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, an industry trade group.

Write to Sarah Morgan at sarah.morgan@dowjones.com

By RHEA WESSEL

On any given day, you can spot 42-year-old Max Hollein dressed in a dark suit, pedaling his bike between the three Frankfurt museums he directs: the Schirn Kunsthalle, which mounts contemporary exhibitions and large surveys, the Städel Museum, known for its Old Masters, and Liebieghaus, home to a collection of ancient, medieval and baroque sculpture.

Gaby Gerster

Max Hollein

Navigating between the museums on opposite sides of the Main river is the easy part. More invigorating, he says, is navigating the full spectrum of society, interacting with potential donors, meeting with artists, overseeing construction workers and encouraging school children to raise money for the Städel by auctioning their own works of art.

Part of Mr. Hollein’s mission, for more than a decade now, has been to transform museums in this banking hub into those fit for a world capital and to make museums accessible to a broader audience. “It is my job to be in a constant dialogue with art and with museum visitors,” Mr. Hollein says. “Museum visitors around 1900, in particular, in Europe, were middle-class intellectuals. Fortunately, today’s visitors have a wide variety of profiles. We’ve got to speak to different visitors in different voices. For major exhibitions, sometimes we have five different catalogs—the regular academic catalog, one for school kids, etc.”

The crown jewel in Mr. Hollein’s efforts to animate Frankfurt’s museum scene will open its doors Saturday, when a new 3,000-square-meter wing for the Städel Museum, one of Germany’s most important museums, will double the Städel’s exhibition space and permanently display works from two large corporate collections that will expand the museum’s scope to more than 700 years of art history. The Städel’s expansion, the biggest in its nearly 200-year history, cost €30 million and is part of a €100-million face-lift going on at various Frankfurt museums. The German Film Museum reopened in August after renovations, and the German Architecture Museum spent a year under reconstruction.

Mr. Hollein took over the city’s Schirn Kunsthalle in 2001. Five years later, after proving his conceptual and marketing muscle, he was also named director of the Städel and the Liebieghaus.

Raised in Vienna, Mr. Hollein was immersed in the world of art from childhood, when personalities such as Joseph Beuys and Frank Gehry would visit for dinner at the invitation of his mother, a fashion designer, and his father, an architect. Mr. Hollein’s father designed Frankfurt’s Museum of Modern Art, which is known to locals as the “pie piece” for its tall, triangular shape. In university, Mr. Hollein says he rebelled by studying business, when his family expected him to pursue the arts.

Over lunch at the Austrian restaurant Lohninger on Frankfurt’s museum row, Mr. Hollein says museums should serve as a public space for the education, enjoyment and social participation of the people.

“Citizens keep asking, ‘Museum, what do you do for us? What is your role in society?’ You have to have a clear answer to this,” he says. “I don’t define a museum by the physical parameters of its building and collection. For me, a museum is a mandate to educate and communicate that begins way before you reach the gates of the museum. We are active in the schools, in the kindergartens, in the hospitals and with the media, etc., to educate and impart culture.”

Consequently, Mr. Hollein isn’t shy about fund-raising and he believes every contribution counts. “If we pull together all the forces—private engagement, corporate engagement and community engagement, then something big can happen. That’s what we’re orchestrating here,” he says.

Felix Semmelroth, director of cultural affairs in Frankfurt, describes Mr. Hollein as persistent and strong-willed. “But he’s also fanciful, flexible and quite accommodating,” Mr. Semmelroth says. For a recent exhibition on Max Beckmann, Mr. Hollein curated a show focused narrowly on the work the German artist did in the U.S. shortly before his death. “The idea alone is fascinating,” Mr. Semmelroth says. “Mr. Hollein’s intellectual contribution is his knowledge of international art circles and his ability to turn that knowledge into unique exhibits.” The Beckmann exhibition brought in nearly 95,000 visitors in three months.

Mr. Hollein’s creativity shows in his conceptualization of exhibitions and their accompanying programs of events, but also in his marketing approach. “We’ve turned the tables,” he says. “If a bank sponsors an exhibit with €200,000, then I take the money, but I say, ‘Now we’re only beginning.’ We want to use all the platforms that the sponsor has—its branches, its employee magazine, its customers.”

Mr. Hollein’s aggressive techniques may have been partly inspired by his work from 1995 to 2000 at the Guggenheim in New York before moving to Frankfurt. While his friends from the Vienna University of Economics and Business got set up in corporate apartments, Mr. Hollein turned down an offer from McKinsey, rented a place in Hell’s Kitchen and set out to learn all he could about curating and marketing art. He worked as the assistant to former Guggenheim director Thomas Krens, who oversaw the building of the Guggenheim in Bilbao.

According to Sylvia von Metzler, the head of Friends of the Städel Museum, Mr. Hollein was the driving force behind Städel’s expansion. The move came simultaneously with the permanent loan of 600 works by Deutsche Bank AG and 200 from DZ Bank AG. “Max even got to select some of the works from the banks’ collections,” she says. The new collection includes pieces by Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, Andreas Gursky and Cindy Sherman.

Mr. Hollein’s efforts have helped to transform Frankfurt into a city of world-class culture. Says Mr. Semmelroth: “Max Hollein has set new standards at the museums and is putting Frankfurt on the international culture road map.”

By LAUREN A. E. SCHUKER

Swiss-born installation artist Urs Fischer is the art world’s demolition man. For New York’s Whitney Biennial in 2006, Mr. Fischer tore through gallery walls to create large gaping holes. The next year, he jackhammered through the floors in Gavin Brown’s West Village art gallery. Now, he has cut a door through one of the white walls of Larry Gagosian’s Beverly Hills, Calif., gallery to better showcase his latest exhibition: “Urs Fischer: Beds & Problem Paintings.”

At a gallery’s annual Academy Awards-pegged exhibit, Urs Fischer breaks down walls of a Beverly Hills gallery to better showcase his latest exhibition. Lauren Schuker explains on Lunch Break. Photo: Urs Fischer/Gagosian Gallery

“Now, everybody thinks that the door belongs there—that you need it to see both parts of the show,” Mr. Fischer said this week at the gallery, gesturing into the room with a heavily tattooed arm.

With the new door in place, viewers can simultaneously see both centerpieces of the exhibition: two life-size aluminum sculptures of beds on the brink of collapse—a state that has interested the 38-year-old Mr. Fischer throughout his career. He started out in Zurich, studying photography.

Over the past decade, Mr. Fischer has gained traction in contemporary art circles for his depictions of things on the verge of falling apart. He once used loaves of sourdough bread to build an alpine cabin; in another series, he carved wax nudes with candle wicks atop their heads so, if lighted, they would melt. One of those waxworks, “Untitled (Candle),” sold at a Sotheby’s auction for $1 million.

© Urs Fischer/Gagosian Gallery

Urs Fischer’s ‘Problem Painting’ is part of a new exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, Calif.

At Gagosian, one bed sculpture lies in the center of each room, surrounded by a series of massive paintings on milled aluminum panels. In an effort to mimic the soft exterior of a real bed, Mr. Fischer coated one of the bed sculptures with white paint—but then interrupted the smooth surface by pouring a pile of real concrete over it, weighing down one side of the sculpture’s surface.

In the other room, a bed buckles under invisible weight; its legs collapse onto themselves. Mr. Fischer has painted the surface with a faded pale blue hue, a gradient of color he distilled from a landscape photograph using Photoshop, a computer program he employs in much of his work.

For the series of paintings at Gagosian, he overlaid old publicity stills from the 1940s and ’50s with silk-screened images such as a bolt, banana or lemon. To create the silk-screened images, he scanned photographs into the computer and then “painted” over them in Photoshop, adding red highlights to a lemon, for example, that in one painting overlays a portrait of a woman. “Everything I do is mechanical—it never goes through the hand,” Mr. Fischer said.

The single-artist exhibition of Mr. Fischer’s work, which opened Thursday evening, is part of a long-standing tradition at the Beverly Hills gallery to open a major show the Thursday before the Academy Awards. The exhibition usually has a Hollywood hook: Last year, the gallery showed 10 paintings by Ed Ruscha in an exhibition entitled “Psycho Spaghetti Westerns.”

Mr. Fischer’s show has echoes of Hollywood, too. Two paintings show Grace Kelly and Jimmy Stewart—although Mr. Fischer covered their faces with silk-screen images: a metal pipe for her, a banana for him.

“It’s not important to me if they are known or not, otherwise I would show their faces,” the artist said. “You can wonder, ‘Who is the person behind the image?’ But my daughter looks at these and says, ‘It’s a banana.’”

Write to Lauren A. E. Schuker at lauren.schuker@wsj.com